Random Thoughts/ October 5, 2007
gotten since I started writing this blog. I want to share on of them with you. I got her permission to do so if you were wondering. This came in from Jana who works in south Florida.
“They will never fix it. We, the "broken" ones, have to find ways to heal. And as we do, bring others along. I'm with you: They will never do it. I'm tired of asking them to. After all, what's in it for them? Not even a decent paycheck any more. So, we'll do what we've always done: appeal to He who Himself was broken, and does heal, truly heal, from the inside out, and use whatever they've got that might help.
God help them for saying one thing and doing another. All of us are the children of one God, who does not look kindly on his children mistreating his children. They will have to answer.
Jana”
I guess I don’t have anymore to add on the subject. She said it very well.
I don’t know whether any of if have been reading the “On Faith” discussions
hosted by Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham on washingtonpost.com, but I find them very interesting.
This is what their site says about “On Faith”
“Religion is the most pervasive yet least understood topic in global life. From the caves of the Afghan-Pakistan border to the cul-de-sacs of the American Sunbelt, faith shapes and suffuses the way billions of people-Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and nonbelievers-think and act, vote and fight, love and, tragically, hate. It is the most ancient of forces. As Homer said, "All men need the gods." Even the most ferocious atheists find themselves doing intellectual battle on a field defined by forces of the faithful.”
The most interesting piece was posted the other day. I will not try to quote the entire argument because I am not sure I even was able to follow it, but here is a short quote from the piece.
“It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.
The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
(Richard Dawkins has been the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford since 1995. The "On Faith" panelist did his D.Phil under the Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Niko Tinbergen. After two years as an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Oxford in 1970 as Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and a Fellow of New College. The British evolutionary biologist is noted for his writings defending evolution. An atheist, his latest book is The God Delusion(2006). He is the author of eight other books.)
The most interesting thing about it to me was that this time it was not us they were blaming the evil acts on. No mention of mental illness being the cause of evil. What a relief.
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